A NEW LOOK AT HUMAN EVOLUTION
A British historian’s two-volume book tracing the development of human thought and how it has made us who we are over time has been released in Chinese.
Despite the popularity of short works on history these days, British historian Peter Watson sticks with his form of comprehensive writing. And his persistence is showcased in his two-volume work of more than 1,000 pages called Ideas: A History from
Fire to Freud that was recently published in China.
The work dwells on the key achievements of mankind from the time humans started walking upright and making fire to the year of 1900, when Sigmund Freud became wellknown for his theory of psychoanalysis.
Watson’s work, together with one of his earlier books, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, which has been translated into nearly 20 languages, provides an integrated picture of the intellectual evolution of humankind to explain how we have become what we are today.
“Reading the book is like entering a museum of human thought, but the collections and the way they are displayed are quite different from ordinary museums,” says Mu Ye, a Chinese poet and editor of the magazine Shanghai Culture.
Watson, 75, is a journalistturned-scholar who was once a research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeology Research at Cambridge University.
He has also published dozens of books, both nonfiction and novels, some under the pen name Mackenzie Ford.
Watson says he came up with the idea of writing about intellectual history in the late 1990s. He was inspired to do this by the British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin.
Watson then made up his mind to write a history of ideas of the 20th century, which was later expanded to cover a longer period of time.
Watson’s work not only includes abstract ideas, but also the products of ideas that have had social consequences.
One example in his work is the invention of the guillotine during the French Revolution.
Before the revolution, there were more than 100 ways to execute prisoners. However, the invention was not only a more efficient one, but also a deliberate way of equalizing punishment.
To deal with the numerous intellectual achievements of human civilization, Watson uses three of them — the soul, Europe and experiments — as clues to lay out the history of ideas.
For him, the idea of the soul, unlike that of God, evolves beyond the advent of the secular world.
And he says the pursuit of “an alternative, better self” has led humankind into romanticism. As a former psychologist, he argues that it has eventually become the idea of the unconscious in the modern world.
As for experiments, he says they have taken people away from following authority blindly and become a driving force for scientific revolutions that have shaped the modern world.
Reading the book is like entering a museum of human thought.” Mu Ye, poet and editor of the magazine Shanghai Culture
Speaking about the rise of Europe, he says it began in the heyday of the Middle Ages and was later developed into a secular world with the birth of a series of new ideas, including the emergence of individualism, when people started looking on themselves not as a part of humanity nor belonging to God, but as an individual in their own right.
The subsequent Renaissance enabled Europeans to enjoy life instead of thinking about an afterlife. And, this was why, in Watson’s view, Europe began to take over and led human civilization into the modern world.
However, by stressing the prosperity of European civilization, as Watson has pointed out, he doesn’t necessarily fall into the trap of Eurocentrism.
“It’s obvious in intellectual history that Europe led the way for nearly 1,000 years. I’m simply describing a reality that was there,” says Watson.
Meanwhile, there are chapters in the book on Chinese civilization.
Watson says he is impressed by the big differences in the Han civilization (206 BC-AD 220) and the Song civilization (960-1279), both of which were responsible for enormous innovations.
“I am particularly fascinated by the Song civilization, because it took place just before the big changes in Europe,” says Watson, adding that he is especially interested in the competitive ancient imperial examination for selecting civil servants that was set up to encourage social mobility and gave ancient China a high level of literacy and education.
During his recent trip to China, Watson also listed some of the areas in which he believes China is leading the world, such as renewable energy, AI and the treatment of prostate cancer.
“I don’t think that we are particularly deaf to what is happening in China. In fact, we’re hungry for new information,” says Watson.
“And one is also looking to China for some innovative ideas about how to live with the internet.”
As for the future, Watson says he is fascinated by the link between political and intellectual history.
“It’s a history that has never been written. It’ll be a lot of work, but a very fruitful area,” he says. “I’m too old, but it can be a career for somebody.”